We document that a firm's culture — specifically, its religiosity — affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions....

Commercial-paper backup lines account for a substantial share of undrawn loan commitments in the corporate sector, but have despite this received scant attention in the credit-line literature. In this paper, I study the liquidity-insurance properties of backup lines using a comprehensive loan-...

We exploit a nation-wide introduction of mandatory disclosure of borrowers' total credit exposures and show that sharing such information increases credit access independent of borrowers' history. Differentiating between borrowers applying to competitor banks and those reapplying to their...

The increase in the lending rate in Nigeria has affected the borrowers in the financial system and it has invariably reduced the pace of economic activities in the country. Such a situation created the need to examine the impact of the lending rate on bank lending in Nigeria. The study made use...